


Static From My Better Sense

by SaltCore



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Hurt Jesse McCree, Hurt/Comfort, Language, M/M, Protective Hanzo Shimada, dad reyes, protective gabriel reyes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-04-30 10:49:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14495298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaltCore/pseuds/SaltCore
Summary: This was not a detour he needed, not now. There’s too much at stake to go chasing after his protégé just because the kid got himself in over his head.But then, how was Reyes to know that someone else had taken up the mantle of keeping Jesse McCree alive in his absence?





	1. The Devil You Know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I blame tumblr for goading me into this

He checks the line of sight from the camera over the grocery across the street one last time, but there’s no question in his mind—this is the place. He pulls the bill of his hat down low to obscure what his pollution mask can’t. The air quality isn’t bad here, never was, but the mask is less out of place than his bare face would be. Reyes never spent much time in front of mirrors before, but he actively avoids them now.

He walks around the corner, out of sight of any camera or person. The dim orange glow from the streetlights doesn’t penetrate the gloom of the side street, leaving this side of the building cloaked in darkness. Above him, on the second story, is a broken window. The hole is about fist sized, with sharp edged splinters of glass jutting into the empty space like jagged teeth.

Perfect.

Reyes relaxes, exhales, lets his body go limp. A normal person might have simply collapsed to the ground, but he hasn’t been in sight of normal in a very long time. His body blurs at the edges, then falls to pieces around him. But it’s still _his_ body, so he’s able to _stretch_ , to _reach_ and pull himself through the hole in the window. He coalesces again on the concrete floor inside, his body snapping back to its customary shape.

Keeping to the periphery, he draws his weapons and edges along the wall. Almost ten hours ago, Sombra had sent him the footage that had brought him here. He’d had her keep tabs on him, just in case, though he had maintained a small, stupid hope that it would be a waste of her time. But trouble always seemed to find Jesse McCree, no matter what he did or where he was.

Of course, he’s been doing his own watching. The price on McCree’s head, both the official and unofficial numbers, is an easy way to gauge how much trouble he gets himself into. Talon had thrown some money at both bounties for the trouble McCree’s caused over the last few years. It made Reyes proud.

But proud or no, a bounty on his head brings attention McCree knows better than to court. Look what it’s gotten him—a gang out for his head, and people more than happy to deliver him. He should never have been anywhere near the States, not after his little fiasco on that train. It was bad enough Sombra had stumbled across him bodily in Dorado at the end of last year, now he was running around with Winston’s ill-conceived gaggle of starry-eyed bullet magnets. McCree knows better than this because Reyes taught him better than this.

Sombra had sent him more than just the feed from the camera across the street and had even promised to keep him updated the moment she had anything else. The most important tidbit was this—McCree had crossed a gang operating on the east coast. About a year ago, he killed two of the leader’s lieutenants and gotten a buyer arrested. They promised a cash bounty, and while it’s not a particularly impressive sum, it _is_ in cash, which is attractive to a certain type of person. It was unusual for Sombra to be so forthcoming—she liked the game, the back and forth of trading information for favors—but then they’d already hashed these terms out a long time ago. So long as the information led to McCree in time, her price didn’t matter.

Even if he does get there in time, he might just kill McCree himself. This was not a detour he needed, not now. There’s too much at stake to go chasing after his protégé. But if he didn’t, who would? Winston’s Overwatch hadn’t moved yet, and Ana was on the other side of the world with Jack chasing dead ends. There hadn’t been a peep out of Genji in years, and, well, when McCree had left Blackwatch he hadn’t left much in the way of friends behind.  

Reyes shakes his head, refocuses on keeping his movements silent. He’s almost made it to the front of the building, where he expects to find anything there is to find. Anything pointing to who took McCree or where they might be going. He edges around a stack of crates, tens of feet from the door that McCree was carried out of hours ago, the door that’s in view of the camera that Sombra scraped footage from.

He expected this scene, but that doesn’t make it easier.

There are two large pools of blood. The centers don’t look fully dried, still slightly shiny in the light from the windows, even after all this time. A testament to the humidity here, more than anything else. McCree hadn’t been bleeding in the few frames that had been captured, so it’s probably not his. There are chipped divots in the concrete floor—bullet impacts. There’s commiserate damage to the walls and some of the crates. All evidence of an ugly fight.

Reyes’ eyes follow a pair of drag marks leading away from the blood, and he spots a single boot poking out from behind a crate. Sloppy work, leaving their dead for someone to find. Good on McCree, for forcing such a high price.

Reyes goes to investigate further. There’s two men hidden, each with a bloody hole between his eyes. McCree’s handiwork, no doubt. There’s also a brown, wide brimmed hat, tossed carelessly on the ground beside them. Reyes holsters one gun, leans down, picks it up to examine more closely. There’s blood on it, not a lot, and one side is crushed. He’s seen it before, in pictures and news clips.

“Goddamnit, kid,” he mutters.

Reyes gets back to his feet, keeping the hat, and snaps pictures of the dead men’s faces. Sombra might be able to identify them, give him more to work with. He doesn’t see any tattoos, any patches, anything at all that’s particularly helpful.

Just as he’s turning back around, he hears a strange twanging noise and then pain erupts from his chest. He looks down, and there’s an arrowhead poking out, just beside his sternum. With a growl, he lets his body start to dissolve and pulls the arrow free. The wound closes, but the hole in his shirt doesn’t. He doesn’t want to waste the energy, not yet. He snaps the arrow in two just by clenching it in his fist and turns to look for his attacker.

He sees him just in time to see another arrow coming. He let it pass through him, then raises his own weapon and fires. The archer had already started running, darting along the catwalk circling the building and making the necessary lead hard to judge, so Reyes only manages to damage a patch of walkway just behind him. The archer jumps to the floor, rolling to disperse the impact, and disappears behind a crate.

Reyes had heard of a mercenary who had been using a bow, though he’d thought the man was working out of East Asia. It was memorable because it had seemed so absurd—but then he’d let Genji operate with a pair of swords, so who was he to judge? He has to admit, the bow is significantly quieter than any firearm and anyone else would have been just as dead.

“You’re late to the party, if you’re after McCree,” Reyes calls.

Reyes hears a snarl, though he can’t pinpoint where. This guy must have really needed the payday if he came all this way. If he insists on being a problem, Reyes will send him home in a body bag. Reyes steps further into the open, opening himself up to a shot so he can get a bead on the archer’s location. He doesn’t take the bait, though.

“Was it you?” the archer growls, his voice loud enough to echo.  He sounds angry, more angry than a missed mark would warrant. “Terrorist. _Monster._ ”

Reyes laughs. So this guy has heard of him. He has balls then, to engage already knowing what Reyes can do. He respects that. It’ll be kind of a shame to kill him.  

“Does it matter? I’ll give you one chance to quit wasting my time. Get out of here, while I’m feeling generous.”

“I don’t know what Talon is planning for Jesse, but you will not have him!”

A volley of arrows flies out of a shadow, and Reyes manages to sidestep the first two but steps into the path of the others. They tear into him, just as painful as the first, and the impact blows his shot wide. Reyes forces his body to unravel again, and the arrows clatter to the ground. He moves—it feels like leaning, almost falling forward—and coalesces behind the archer, his gun leveled at the back of the man’s head.

“How do you know McCree?” Reyes asks coolly. If he’s after McCree’s bounty, this is already a job gone bad. Most mercenaries would have left long before now. The ones who don’t know when to quit don’t usually live long enough to get reputations. This one had also used McCree’s first name, like he was familiar with McCree. Like he’d earned the right to call him by his first name.

“What do you care?” he hisses. He straightens up, claiming a few more inches of height from the wide stance he’d been shooting from. Even from behind, Reyes can tell his chin is jutted forward. Defiant.

“Answer the question.”

“I don’t answer to something like _you_. Certainly not about Jesse.” he spits.

Reyes lowers his gun, stepping back. Now he’s curious, and starting to reevaluate his mercenary theory. It’s _possible_ he could be working with McCree. Lots of things are possible. But McCree’s working with the group calling itself Overwatch, so that would mean—

“Christ, you’re not one of _them_ , are you?” Reyes says.

He jerks, just a little, surprised. So he is. Reyes can’t help but chuckle. How in the hell had this guy gotten wrapped up in that?

The archer, sensing that Reyes has relaxed, spins on his heel, arrow drawn back. Reyes rolls his shoulders back, opening his chest. It hasn’t worked yet, but he’s welcome to try shooting him again.  

“What have you done with Jesse?” he growls.

“You first, kid.”

He visibly bristles at that, pulling the arrow back just a little further. He stares Reyes down, meeting his eyes. Reyes stares right back, refusing to be intimidated. Then, abruptly, he lets the bowstring go slack, lowering the bow.

“Jesse is my partner,” he says, like that term isn’t loaded. It’s probably not what he means, but trouble and a pretty face was always McCree’s type. “Now, what have you done with him?”

“Nothing,” Reyes says.

“Do not lie to me!”

“It’s been most of a day since McCree got jumped. Why the fuck would I stick around?”

The archer opens his mouth to say something else, but he’s interrupted by a sharp chime. He flinches slightly, then freezes. It’s almost absurd.

“Go on, answer it. I’ll wait.”

He eyes him warily, but when Reyes holsters his weapon he slowly returns the arrow to the quiver slung over his back and reaches into a pocket. He pulls out a phone—or what looks like a phone anyway, it’s almost certainly more than that—and glances down at the screen. His eyes go wide and his mouth opens just a sliver, and then he bolts. Reyes can move faster than him, so with a few pumps of his legs he’s grabbed the other man by the back of his jacket.

“What was that?”

“Let me go!”

The archer twists and struggles like a mad thing, but Reyes just throws him to the ground and plants a boot on his chest. Not enough to really hurt him, just enough to let him know he’s not going anywhere without Reyes’ say so.

“What did they tell you? Was that Overwatch?”

“I would sooner die than give him up to you,” he hisses. Reyes believes him. He takes a long, slow breath and eases off the archer. If Overwatch is coming, if they can handle this, then there’s no reason for him to be here. This detour would be easy enough to explain away. It gets harder the longer it takes to find McCree and get him back into friendly hands.

“Look. I’m not here to kill McCree, but he’s heading toward people that will. So _quit_ _wasting time_.”

“How can I possibly trust anything you have to say?”

Frustrated, Reyes reaches up and pulls the mask down to his neck. Let this chucklefuck see for himself.

The archer doesn’t breathe for a moment, just stares up at Reyes. For his part, Reyes crosses his arms and waits for the shock to pass. He has that other mask for a reason, and not just to hide his identity. His _condition_ is distracting at best.

“Gabriel Reyes. Jesse has pictures of you.”

Reyes huffs. Of course McCree does. Sentimental kid. Reyes pulls the mask back up.

“Trust me or don’t, I don’t care. I can find him on my own, but you clearly just got word of some kind. So I want you to ask yourself, what’s going to get McCree back the fastest?”

The archer starts to get to his feet, painfully slowly, clearly buying time. Reyes is starting to get impatient, but he’s got the feeling that he’s the type to dig in when pushed. When the archer meets his eyes, he can tell he’s come to a decision.

“Jesse had a transponder implanted in his arm. I just got the first ping.”

“What took it so long to turn on?”

“It’s manually activated. Jesse’s alive.”

McCree’s alive, and now Overwatch can find him. He doesn’t have to be here after all. He weighs killing the archer again, but that word _partner_ catches him up. He seems awfully invested for this to be a professional relationship. Reyes has piled up a lot of sins, made a lot of tough choices, but _that_ is something he wants to be sure about. He owes McCree that much.

“So, your people can intercept.”

“You said to decide if telling you would find Jesse faster—I was told I could not expect reinforcements or transport when I reported Jesse missing. There was a _mishap_ and the repairs are taking time.”

Reyes looks him over again, this time with an eye toward tactical assessment. The choice of weapon is eccentric, but he’s no incompetent. And he has a direct link to McCree. That’s worth everything.

“Let’s go. I have a car waiting.”

Reyes doesn’t check to see if he’s following. If he’s worth sparing, then he’ll come. Reyes heads toward the back of the building, McCree’s hat still in his hand, even after the fight. He’ll want it back, knowing him.

The archer appears at his elbow, silent as a ghost. He has his phone in his hand, and keeps glancing down. The blue light of the screen cuts harsh shadows on his face, making the angles even sharper.

“What’s the time between pings?”

“Fifteen minutes.  It will run as long as his prosthesis has power.”

Not real time, but good enough. Reyes feels conflicted about it—he’s glad McCree can be tracked _now_ , but that’s a dangerous thing. There’s no guarantee they’re the only ones who’ve noticed the signal, however unlikely it might be. Better in his prosthesis than not, he can at least be rid of that more easily than something implanted subdermally.

As they walk, Reyes finally lets the holes in his shirt be repaired by the regenerative nanites. He’ll need to eat soon, or their programming will seek to sate themselves externally. They come to the back of the building, but the rear exit is still locked. Reyes arches an eyebrow at the archer. He hadn’t come through the front, and he certainly didn’t come in like Reyes did. The archer glances up, to where a window is open. Reyes snorts. That’s like some stunt Genji would pull to show off.

Reyes kicks the door just beside the lock, and it snaps open like the deadbolt wasn’t even there. The hydraulic door closer catches it before the door hits the exterior of the building, but it groans under the sharp movement. Reyes looks around, but the area is just as empty as before. The archer hesitates in the doorway, looking high and low. Exactly as paranoid as he’d have to be to still be alive, given his previous line of work.

Neither one of them speak as Reyes leads them back to the car. The archer trails behind him, keeping to the shadows. It’s not as if he could conceal much of anything under that short jacket of his, but it’s almost two in the morning, so the kind of people still out aren’t going to be much of a problem if they see the bow.

The car is purposely nondescript, a low slung sedan in an unassuming black. There are modifications of course, all carefully crafted not to draw attention. Reyes punches in a code from his handset, and the doors unlock with an audible clunk as the solenoids slide home. The archer waits for him to get in first. Reyes drops into the seat, already pushed back as far as it will go to accommodate his frame. He tosses McCree’s hat into the backseat, well out of the way.  The archer gets into the passenger seat, settling his weapon and quiver between his legs. There is another sharp chirp from the archer’s phone, another ping from McCree’s transponder.

McCree’s managed to survive another fifteen minutes. It’s a strong start.

The full autopilot had been ripped out of this vehicle—the constant back and forth with other cars and the navigation satellites gives away far too much—and replaced with the most basic features to replicate unassisted driving should the car be taken into traffic, as well as some software to spoof full functionality if inspected, but it still has passive navigation. Reyes manually enters the coordinates from the archer’s phone. With a basic heading, Reyes pulls the car out of the lot he’d hidden it in and drives smoothly onto the empty street. As they pull onto the highway, the archer’s phone begins ringing.

“Don’t answer that.”

“It’s Overwatch. If I don’t check in, that would be suspicious, wouldn’t it?” he snaps. Reyes really does not like that tone, but he has to allow that he’s right.

“Fine. Don’t do anything I’ll make you regret.”

Hanzo answers the call, bringing the phone up to his face.

“Hanzo reporting. Yes, I’m well.”

Hanzo? Reyes has heard that name before.

“I got the pings as well. I’m heading there now.”

Hanzo’s, apparently his name is Hanzo, lips thin.

“How much longer will the repairs take?”

Hanzo glances at Reyes out of the corner of his eye.

“I understand.”

Hanzo. That was Genji’s brother’s name. The one that tried to kill him. He’s never heard of another Hanzo; it’s not a common name. It seems like it should be a coincidence and nothing more, but Reyes hasn’t lived this long by chalking things up to coincidence.

Right as the archer hangs up, Reyes speaks,

“You’re Hanzo Shimada, aren’t you?”

Hanzo goes very still and very quiet, but when he answers, his voice is steady.

“Yes.”

Reyes laughs. He can’t help it. Of all the people to be sitting here in a car with him, it’s this son of a bitch. Just fucking perfect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm hanging out and procrastinating with drabbles at https://saltytothecore.tumblr.com/


	2. Thousand Mile Night

They’re tracking north and eastward, following the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The sun has only now risen enough not to be a nuisance. Reyes has had to maintain pace with the automated traffic as day broke, and it’s grated as they picked up the morning commuters and the flow of traffic slowed. They still have so much ground to gain.

Hanzo doesn’t speak, which is the only positive thing Reyes could say about him. He’s been alternating between staring at his screen and watching Reyes with unconcealed suspicion for hours now, only moving to update their heading. As if, of the two of them, Reyes posed the greater danger to the success of the task at hand.

In a sense, Reyes is the more _dangerous_. He is a thing rebuilt from the ground up for war, and even as long as the war has been over, that fact still remains. And then, not that long ago, he was rebuilt again to _survive._  Dr. O’Deorain made sure of that. When the enhancements SEP began to degrade, began taking the parts of his body they were meant to improve down with them, she propelled him past the limits of mortality. He hates her for that and is grateful in equal measure. He would have been dead long before the date they put on his death certificate otherwise, but this is not an existence he would wish on anyone.

And, yes, Reyes has waded into the shit, waded in deep, but he knows what he’s doing. He’s known what he was doing since the moment he’d put on a uniform and learned he was the kind of man who would kill on the blind, stupid hope that it would mean others might not have to. He could bear the burden of getting his hands dirty, of making hard choices and living with the consequences, so long as it meant that in the end the world would be better off for him having done something.

Even if he could never convince Jack or Ana or McCree that there wasn’t a rot in Overwatch, a rot that went deep, a rot that started in Talon, it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It didn’t mean it wasn’t other places too. And day by day, inch by inch, he is excising that infection. No one will thank him, will know to thank him, but he’s not doing this for thanks. He’s doing it because no one else can.

What Reyes has never done is kill for his own gain. He’s never tried to annihilate someone for being an embarrassment. So Hanzo fucking Shimada can shove his suspicion up his ass. If it weren’t more expedient to have him around because of his direct line to McCree, Reyes wouldn’t tolerate him at all. 

Reyes had every note made to Genji’s medical file forwarded to him during the months of recovery and rehabilitation, watching his progress. He’d never seen that kind of damage done to a human, not even during the Crisis, and he still can’t fathom the force of will it took to survive. Genji was always a little cagey, at least with Reyes, about the precise details of what had happened to him, but all Reyes had needed to know was that it had been the man sitting beside him.

Reyes is going to have to talk to McCree about the company he keeps. Winston must be truly, truly desperate if this is the kind of person he is resorting to. Winston and Genji worked together when Genji liaised with Overwatch, might have even been friends, and surely he knew at least the bare bones of what had happened to Genji. It always seemed to bubble up eventually with him, a rage he could direct but couldn’t quite contain. So if Hanzo is working with Overwatch, then McCree has no business tempting fate with them. It’ll just get him killed.

If he lives through this, that is.                               

The phone chimes again, exactly on time. Instead of updating their route, Hanzo just hunches forward over the phone with his face twisted in confusion. He sucks his lower lip between his teeth and worries it while he pulls something else up on his phone. Reyes can’t watch him closely—the tradeoff for maintaining a low profile is that he has to actually drive the car—but something isn’t right. He grips the steering wheel tighter, feels the plastic begin to give under his grip.

By the next ping, Hanzo still hasn’t updated their heading.

“What’s going on?” Reyes asks, his patience exhausted.

“He hasn’t been moving. The last three were all from the same location, or at least within instrument error.”

They could be refueling, or they could have made it to wherever they were going. Or they could have figured out McCree had a transponder in his prosthesis and cut it off. Reyes clicks his tongue against his teeth as he considers asking Hanzo more about how it works. When McCree left Blackwatch, the model he had would deactivate if his blood pressure or O2 sat dropped below a certain threshold, but McCree doesn’t have quite the same one anymore, if Sombra can be believed. He either modified it or got another one entirely. Hanzo had said the transponder was wired into the prosthesis’ power source, and given the showing he’d seen so far, he doesn’t think these bounty hunters would be able to remove a live prosthesis from McCree without either killing him or damaging it to the point of inoperability.

Reyes takes a long, slow breath. He hasn’t heard from Sombra, so the best lead he has is the transponder. Until he has a reason not to, he’ll chase that, even with the possibility it’s a dead end lingering in the back of his mind. It’s the only option he has.

Reyes reaches out at zooms in on the last destination Hanzo gave on the car’s navigation pane. It’s north of New Orleans, on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain. He knows to expect swampland, though he can’t say he’s ever done more than fly over that city and the surrounding area.

“What is the error?” Reyes asks.

“A few meters,” Hanzo says after a moment’s hesitation. So, a range of no more than a building or two. Reyes glances down to the dashboard. They have enough charge left to get there without stopping, but only barely.

It will only matter if they don’t move him between now and then.

 

* * *

 

Hours pass in the same tense silence as the car eats up the miles. Hanzo doesn’t update their heading again.

The interstate is a sunbaked, sickly gray ribbon running straight and flat through the damp lowlands. The monotony makes Reyes uneasy. Old instincts tell him that he cannot trust the calm, that the longer the silence on the road lasts, the worst the eventual disruption will be. He grits his teeth and tightens his grip on the steering wheel.

The war is over, he tells himself. The war has been over a long time.

 

* * *

                                             

Hanzo slams his fist into the dashboard, shouting. They’re less than an hour away from McCree’s location, and while Reyes’ Japanese isn’t great, he spent enough time around Genji to know swearing when he hears it.

Reyes feels a commiserate surge of impotent rage. They were so close. What if they’ve already made the hand off? McCree might not have much longer, and now they’re back to chasing, though they’ve closed the gap significantly.

All over again, Reyes burns with the same kind of worry-tinged fury he’d felt when Sombra had alerted him to McCree’s capture. If McCree had just followed orders, this wouldn’t be happening. Reyes had told him, in no uncertain terms, that if he was going he had better damn well _go_. Keep his head down, keep moving. It was the only way to stay alive until Reyes made things _safe_.

But the kid had gone and done the opposite, and now he could be dead before Reyes catches up to him.

One of many, many things that Reyes will never be able to forget was the view into the cryopod when they brought McCree back. He wasn’t sure in the moment that it wasn’t already a casket, that’d they’d just frozen a corpse for formality’s sake. He still had blood and dust on his face, still had his burnt clothes on. The pulped meat hanging off his shoulder where his left arm should have been looked like something Jack would scrape off a grill if he got too far into the beer before deciding he wanted burgers. That was Reyes exact, awful thought _So that’s where Jack hides the burgers he fucks up,_ and he was almost sick right there on the landing pad, because how the fuck could anyone think something like that while McCree was barely clinging to life?

Equally vivid in Reyes’ memory is McCree standing in front of his desk, still looking gaunt and sick, handing him his resignation forms. McCree had dropped weight while recovering that he was having trouble putting back on. Ana would have been on top of him, but she’d been gone for months at that point, and Reyes just didn’t have time to sit and watch a grown man eat.

Instead, Reyes had been consumed with finding out _how_ , how that op went so wrong. He had checked over all the intel himself, signed off on every detail of the plan, and still, somehow, McCree’s cover had been blown. Someone there, in Blackwatch, had tried to get McCree killed, and Reyes had meant to find them and painstakingly turn them inside out. But that was before Geneva, before things really went to hell.

He never found the person responsible for what happened to McCree, but he can do this. Get McCree back on his way, even if it’s a way Reyes would rather he abandon, or get him vengeance—either way it’s so, so simple.

“Where are they heading?” Reyes asks once Hanzo has had a few minutes to calm down.

“East again,” Hanzo mutters. “Why are you driving so slowly? We might be able to catch them.”

“Look, kid, you think getting the attention of the local cops is going to help, then, by all means, feel free to get out and do it, but I find that kind of thing a nuisance.”

“Stop calling me that. I am not a _child_ ,” Hanzo growls.

“You’re a kid from where I’m standing. I was knee deep in brass and mud while you still had other people wiping your ass for you.”

Reyes glances at Hanzo, who looks furious. Reyes has seen that exact look on so many faces he’s lost count, the kind of anger that comes with knowing that’s there no response that will win the argument and hating it. That’s when he knew he was getting to them, back in Blackwatch, when they got that look but had learned the good sense to just shut up.

A light starts blinking on the dashboard, signaling the car is running low on charge. The rangefinder estimates that they could get a little over a hundred klicks. So, just about as far as where they were holding McCree. They’ll have to stop somewhere to recharge, there’s no way around it. Might as well be someplace where they might turn up something useful.

Hanzo blows an aggravated sigh out his nose and leans forward to update the nav, but Reyes holds out his hand.

“No, we’re stopping there.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I said we’re stopping there, _kid_.”

“You are going to waste time going where Jesse was, instead of where he is going?” Hanzo says, strangely even in diction, but there’s the beginning of insubordination in that tone. Reyes points to the rangefinder, which is visible to the passenger if he would just look.

“You wanna hold your dick in the heat while waiting for some early century charging station in the middle of nowhere to move electrons, or do you want to do something useful with our time? By the way, in the future you can just assume that I’ve already thought everything through.”

Hanzo doesn’t say anything, just lowers the window and digs into his pocket. For the briefest moment, Reyes thinks he’s about to crawl out the window—Reyes is about to let him, just to see what happens—but he pulls out a crushed carton of cigarettes and a lighter. He cups his hand around the end of the cigarette and lights it, taking a long drag before blowing the smoke out of the window. Some blows back in anyway, the sharp smell irritating Reyes’ nose despite the pollution mask.  Loathe as he is to admit it, the smell is warmly nostalgic.  It reminds him of days when there were people he could trust.

Hanzo lights a second cigarette with the embers of the first, and Reyes finds himself wondering just how many he’s got if he’s willing to chain smoke them. Even McCree would ration at his worst moments, because Reyes isn’t in the habit of making cigarette stops. He frowns to himself at the thought of this guy in the middle of a nic fit. Reyes might end up killing him yet.

Hanzo finishes the second cigarette and doesn’t light another. The car’s air conditioning struggles to undo ten minutes of Gulf air streaming into the car, but eventually it does it. Reyes pulls up charging stations near their destination on the map. Might as well sort out the details while there’s time.

 

* * *

 

The only sound on the heavy summer air is the faint wail of a siren in the distance, but after a few seconds of listening Reyes decides it’s not coming any closer, and he keeps walking. They left the car at one of the singlet charging pillars that litter industrial areas like these. It took a while to find one that was operational, not run over or vandalized to the point of inoperability, but he did and now they’ve got about half an hour of forced downtime to look around.

“That one,” Hanzo says, jerking his head at a building across the street. Reyes steps off the sidewalk and into the meager, useless shade of an awning, and takes a moment to look around.

The building is a low slung, rambling thing, with a storm battered roof that sags under its own weight. Green-black mildew lurks in the corners, feasting on the perpetually damp air and giving the whole structure a diseased look. It’s surrounded by the memory of pavement, a gravel ring with only a few stubborn patches of asphalt hinting at the fact there was ever anything else. The finishing touch on the whole tableau is the chain link fence, which is half collapsed and red with rust.

The property gives off an aura of neglect, perhaps even abandonment. To Reyes’ eye, it appears genuine, not the affected shabbiness of some of the facilities he has worked out of before.  There’s too much large debris littered around the parking lot and in front of the doors, preventing smooth ingress and egress, no sign of cameras or other surveillance.

They could of course, simply be that good, but they left behind two of their own for authorities to find, so Reyes genuinely doubts it. More likely, this was just a convenient place to lay low for a while. He turns back to Hanzo.

“You sure?”

Hanzo nods. Reyes cracks his neck and crosses the street, not waiting for Hanzo. He draws one weapon, though he keeps it low for the moment. This whole area looks abandoned, or at least abandoned by the kind of people who don’t know how to mind their own business when trouble comes calling, but Reyes still doesn’t want the hassle of dealing with local authorities.

There aren’t any convenient broken windows on this side of the building, but the door’s hinges are screwed into rotting wood, so it’s easy for Reyes to simply rip the door free. Hanzo is behind him, moving on light feet with an arrow already nocked. Reyes can’t help the comparison to Genji; he would do the same thing, appearing at Reyes’ six just because he could.

Reyes draws his other weapon and enters the building. It’s dim and smells like mildew and garbage. The walls, or at least what walls are still standing, all have water damage. Reyes wrinkles his nose at the spots of mold growing in the sagging ceiling. This place isn’t a part of a sophisticated operation, that’s for sure, but he doesn’t let it lower his guard. Desperate can be just as dangerous as good.

Reyes can’t hear Hanzo behind him, so he glances over his shoulder and sees him stepping carefully around the trash littering the floor, a look of complete disgust on his face. He doesn’t chide himself for the warm rush of schadenfreude. Reyes doubts a guy like him has ever spent more than a few hours dusty, never mind caked in mud and blood for days, with evac more days out still. It felt like it took hours to get all the mud off after an op like that; Reyes wonders if it takes longer to feel clean when it’s your brother’s blood you’ve got dried under your nails.

Reyes turns back and keeps going. There’s no sound in the air, and while he expected that they’d already moved on, he’s still disappointed.  Finding one of the bounty hunters might give them a chance to get ahead of them. If Reyes knew _where_ they were heading, he knows he could get there first, be waiting for them.

They come to a large room, what might have been a loading bay at one time. There are several crates as well as discarded fast food bags sitting in a rough circle near the back wall, clearly where people were sitting, and two camp cots a little further on. Reyes holsters one gun and goes over to get a better look.

The crates are military surplus, sturdy plastic and OD green. Reyes nudges one with his boot and it scoots easily—empty, or mostly empty. He tries another and it doesn’t move so readily. He pops the latches and finds ammunition boxes stacked inside, mostly smaller caliber rounds for the kinds of guns that are easier to conceal.

This is a lot to just abandon. There’s a few thousand dollars’ worth of rounds sitting right here, and it’s unlikely all the other crates are empty. Reyes looks around again, and spots a tarp covering a lot of squarish something. This might not be a convenient stopover, but a cache of some kind. No wonder they stayed for so long.

Behind him, Hanzo is inspecting what look like massive batteries connected to a thick cable that snakes its way up to the ceiling. Probably for recharging their transportation, if Reyes had to bet. There’s certainly a wide, clear path from the huge roller doors to the batteries, more than wide enough for a van or truck.

“There’s nothing here,” Hanzo says.

Reyes doesn’t dignify that with a response. They’ve only been here a few minutes, and just because there’s no one doesn’t mean they didn’t leave anything important behind. But that should be obvious, so Reyes doesn’t say it. Hanzo walks up and pulls Reyes by the arm after the silence stretches for a moment.

“We are just wasting time here,” Hanzo adds, accusatory.

Reyes jerks his arm back and presses into Hanzo’s space, leaning over the shorter man. He is getting sick of Hanzo’s fucking attitude.

“You trying to imply something?” Reyes growls. Hanzo meets his stare, not retreating so much as a millimeter.

“I don’t think you’re here to find Jesse, and I don’t think you care about what happens to him.”

“Do _not_ act like you get to lecture me about taking care of my people. I’ve seen firsthand what you’re capable of.”

 _That_ strikes a nerve, and Hanzo’s face turns puce and his hands curl into fists at his sides.

“He was alone for years! Is that how you _take care of your people_?” Hanzo snarls.

“He _left_. But before he left, I taught him everything he needed to know to stay alive. He was fine before he signed back up with Overwatch.”

Reyes turns away and starts walking. If he keeps arguing, he’s liable to rip Hanzo’s head off. Not that it would be a huge loss.

“He still mourns you,” Hanzo hisses to his back. Reyes spins on his heel, expecting to see a smug look he can knock off, but its anger instead. “Your death _hurt_ him, still hurts him. But here you are fit and alive, and yet you’re content to let him wallow in his grief.”

“I don’t owe you an explanation.”

“You owe him one.”

So, that’s what it feels like, getting maneuvered into a corner. No wonder people get that look.

“Why the fuck do you care what I owe him?” Reyes asks.

“I hate seeing him hurt,” Hanzo says, matter of fact. _That_ gives Reyes pause. There’s no way. He had been fairly certain McCree had adopted Genji’s opinion of his brother, out of loyalty if nothing else.

“Does McCree _know_ who you are?” Reyes asks, incredulous.

“Of course,” Hanzo answers, completely without reservation. It surprises, Reyes, it honestly does. What the fuck is going on here? Occam is telling him one thing, but he can’t reconcile that with what he knows of McCree. But then, Hanzo had used the word _partner_ and has access to McCree’s emergency beacon, and no matter what Reyes thinks about it, that means something.

“Do you really find it so surprising that someone would love him?” Hanzo asks after Reyes doesn’t reply, something strangely sad in his tone. Reyes shakes his head; he only finds it surprising that McCree would love _him_ , though honestly, Reyes never had put much stock in McCree’s taste.

Before either of them can say anything else a noise outside arrests their attention. It’s a slowly escalating sound, the throbbing bassline of music coming from car speakers. The sound grows louder, loud enough to be originating from just outside. Hanzo darts to the high ground, easily climbing into the exposed rafters above. Reyes exhales and leans, letting his body drift apart and coalesce behind cover.

The sound abruptly cuts out, and after a moment a door opens and a man walks in, humming the same beat. He ambles toward the circled crates, seemingly unworried about the possibilty someone could have broken in while he was away. He turns his back to Reyes’ position, and there, tucked in his belt, is a familiar revolver.

Peacekeeper.

Reyes sees red. That’s McCree’s gun, and this trash is carrying it like he has the fucking right. Reyes jumps out, covering the distance in almost no time at all, and grabs the man by the back of the neck and hurls him into the wall. He groans as he crumples to the ground.

Reyes kicks him onto his front and takes Peacekeeper. Hanzo appears at his elbow, looking as incensed as Reyes feels. Reyes hands Hanzo McCree’s gun and drags the man by the leg toward a support beam. Reyes has paracord on him, and he pulls out a coil and ties the man to the beam before he can regain his bearings.

Reyes grabs a handful of the man’s thin, greasy hair and tips his head back. He blinks a few times, but he’s clearly having trouble understanding just how fucked he really is.

“I’m only going to tell you this once, _don’t_ make my life difficult. Answer my questions and maybe you get to go back to whatever rathole you call home tonight.”

He sneers up at Reyes, and Reyes sighs. They always want to be difficult. He lets the man’s hair go and stands back.

“You picked up a bounty yesterday, we already know that. Where are they making the exchange?”

“What, you hoping to make a quick buck?” he responds.

“That really isn’t what you should be worried about. Where are they going?”

“I’m not rolling over on my boys that easy. Go fuck yourselves, vultures.”

Reyes glances down at his watch. They have about twenty minutes before the car is ready. Even in Blackwatch, that wasn’t enough time to get an answer he could even begin to trust. Reyes had never liked torture; it was messy and unreliable. Simple intimidation has its place, but bargaining worked better; appealing to someone’s base instinct for survival resulted in more reliable intel. But Reyes has neither the time nor the inclination to bargain with this son of a bitch, and he can already tell he wouldn’t be cooperative anyway.

Reyes pats him down instead of asking another question and finds his phone. It doesn’t have the look of a burner, which means it might have something of value. He can transfer an image to Sombra, see if she can get anything out of it.

Reyes turns away and gets out his own handset to start the imaging process. This looks like a bog standard commercial unit, so the software on his should have no trouble cracking and indexing it. He sends Sombra a heads up and then points his handset at the target and starts the cracking program. He slips them both into the same pocket and turns back.

Hanzo is in the guy’s face, shaking him by the shirt. Reyes crosses his arms and settles in to watch. He was yakuza, after all.

“Where are you taking him?” Hanzo bellows, his voice bouncing off the metal roof above and returning in a thin mockery. Reyes clenches his jaw, annoyed at the sound.

The man doesn’t answer, and Hanzo rears back and smacks him across the face with the back of his hand. The sharp noise is unpleasant, especially after the echoes. Hanzo does it again, but it doesn’t get him an answer that time either. Reyes presses his lips together behind the mask. Hanzo is coming on too strong. His desperation is palpable, and it makes him dangerous but paradoxically less intimidating. He ought to know better.

Their interrogee puckers his lips and spits at Hanzo. He dodges, but it just riles him further. He starts with body blows, and though his jacket obscures the finer details of his build, there’s no hiding his well-developed shoulders. He could kill someone that way, if he put his mind to it.

Reyes watches Hanzo lay into him for a few more minutes before losing his patience. To think, Hanzo was just up in arms about _wasting_ _time_. Reyes grabs Hanzo by the back of his jacket and hauls him off. Hanzo is slightly out of breath, and his knuckles are already red. One is even split and bleeding sluggishly.

“We’ve spent enough time here,” Reyes says.

“He could tell us where they’re taking Jesse!” Hanzo hisses.

“He’d tell you _something_ eventually, just to get you to stop, but you couldn’t trust it. There is a point of diminishing returns, and we are definitely past that.” Reyes lets Hanzo go. “You want to punish that guy for laying hands on McCree? I get it. But this is a distraction, and I think we both know it.”

Hanzo adjusts his jacket, scowling up at Reyes, but he doesn’t make some irritating remark. Reyes holds his hand up in a conciliatory gesture.

“I’m going back to the car. If you’re not there when it’s ready, I’ll take my chances relying on my own channels.”

Reyes turns and does exactly that, going back the way they’d come. Getting the phone was worth the detour, and while he doesn’t give a single, solitary fuck about what happens to that bounty hunter, he’s also not going to waste hours beating him to death just for the satisfaction.

It’s painfully bright outside after the gloom of that building, and Reyes pulls his hood a little further over his face to cut the glare. He takes a moment to look around, but it’s just as still and empty as it was before. Good. Reyes walks out to the road like he belongs there, not obviously paying attention to his surroundings. Just as he rounds a corner, Reyes hears footsteps. Hanzo runs up to his side with a blank look.

Reyes doesn’t ask.

 

* * *

 

Reyes pulls into a free bay at a charging station at the edge of a flyspeck town just as the sun is setting and gets out. Even with the sun going down, sweat immediately begins to pool at the small of his back. There’s a slow, hot breeze, choked with humidity and the faint smell of rotting plant matter. The only sound is the hum of the lights above and the screaming insects in the scrubby patch of trees ringing the lot. He swipes a crypto chit at the terminal, plugs the charger into the port, and leans against the vehicle.

The station is old, maybe even from the first quarter of the century, and the screen is pocked with dead pixels, but Reyes can still read the timer telling him it will be at least twenty minutes before the car is fully recharged. Better than last time, at least.

Behind him, Hanzo gets out. Reyes doesn’t turn around to watch him, but he listens as Hanzo slaps the door shut and takes a few steps away. There’s a rustling, a faint rasping, and then the pungent smell of cigarette smoke. It lingers around them, too heavy for the sluggish breeze to move.

The last two pings came from the same location. They’ve stopped again, this time near Jacksonville, which is only a few hundred more kilometers. If they get lucky, Reyes and Hanzo will be able to catch them this time. If this isn’t the drop off.

Reyes got confirmation from Sombra that she’d gotten the image of the phone, but that’s it. She’ll tell him when she’s done, and there’s no point in harassing her. She’s too prone to spite for that. Still, he wishes he knew if Jacksonville was _it_. He’s not sure what he would do, but he still wants to know all the same.

He hears Hanzo’s phone beep again, and he looks at his watch. He could have sworn it hasn’t been fifteen minutes. He stares at his watch.

It’s only been seven.

Hanzo makes a soft choked noise, and Reyes spins. Hanzo’s hand is pressed over his mouth and he’s staring at the phone. His cigarette is burning on its own by his feet. Icy tendrils of fear rob Reyes of his breath.

“I lost the signal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm hanging out and procrastinating with drabbles at https://saltytothecore.tumblr.com/


	3. Roll With the Blast

It hadn’t taken long to get Sombra on the line, but it took longer than Reyes wanted.

“Jesus Christ, what’s going on?” she huffs in lieu of a greeting.

“I need something. _Now_.”

“I’m working as fast as I—” She stops for moment. “Aw, shit, something happened didn’t it?”

“Do you have _anything_?” Reyes asks.

“Yeah, I mean, I got the image decrypted, I’m still going through it, but I got his contacts. I was going to let you know where they were hanging out once I knew. There’s a lot,” she pauses, and Reyes can almost hear her curl her lip. “Dude had some _weird shit_ saved, even by my standards. But you’re calling, _so_.”

“I had a line on him, but I lost it.”

“ _Shit_. Like, did he have implants pinging out or—?”

Reyes quickly balances the wisdom of telling her more about McCree than she already knows. They did happen to run into each other in Dorado last year, after all, so she’ll know about the fact of the prosthesis. And what could Reyes hide now that she couldn’t find out on her own later, given the incentive?

“Beacon in his prosthesis went dark. Well before it should have lost power.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” she hisses into the mic. “Your boy’s in some shit, huh?”

Reyes doesn’t dignify that with a response. He hears something clatter on the other end and the creak of a chair.

“Okay, I mean, I was working before, but I’m _working_ working now, yeah?”

“Good.”

Reyes expects to hear her disconnect, but to his surprise the line stays open, humming faintly into his ear.

“He was kind of like your kid or whatever, right?” she says, a little hesitant.

Reyes doesn’t answer, just grits his teeth together. He doesn’t want her sympathy, he wants her results. Sympathy never solved anything.

“If he doesn’t—if he’s—” Sombra pauses, audibly reconsidering. “Fucking sucks,” she finishes. It’s impossible to tell with her, but she sounds genuine. Reyes sighs.

“I want anything, no matter how tenuous, as soon as you have it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, and then she hangs up.

Reyes squeezes his handset and takes a deep breath. Fights down the urge to put his fist through something. He hasn’t felt this kind of helpless frustration since the first days after the Crisis ended, when there were a million things to do but they lacked the _fucking permission_ to do even one of them.

Reyes has McCree’s last known location. He could go the instant the car has finished charging, barrel on down the road alone in pursuit of—of what, precisely? Another straggler on whom he can vent his frustration? McCree might still be there when Reyes arrives, or the bounty hunters might have realized what he was doing and bolted, or McCree got his skull blown open and the arm engaged its failsafe. Everything else Reyes considers is a variation on one of those outcomes, and two out of three times he’s better off waiting for Sombra to point him in the correct direction. As for Hanzo—

Reyes turns around, but Hanzo is _gone_. His phone is on the ground where he’d been standing, next to that burnt down cigarette, but there’s not a trace of the man. Reyes doesn’t know yet if that pisses him off or not.

Hanzo is a liability, certainly. An unknown. Uncertainty is the same as danger as far as Reyes is concerned. It had been a bad idea to reveal himself to Jack and Ana, but he’d been furious in the moment, and he’s worked around it since.  He supposes impatience is to blame for revealing himself to Hanzo, and all for nothing. It’s been a long time since he’d indulged in impatience, and he remembers now why it wasn’t worth it.

The ruthless pragmatism that has ruled Reyes’ life for decades tells him that killing Hanzo would be the cleanest thing. Would reduce the risk he poses to Reyes’ work to nothing. What has Hanzo done to warrant Reyes’ mercy?

What has he done, except chase McCree down for hundreds of klicks, same as Reyes?

Reyes sighs. If McCree cares as much about Hanzo as Hanzo seems to care about him, if he gave McCree even one iota of happiness, then Reyes can set aside pragmatism. If McCree is still alive, then Reyes doesn’t want to meet him with that blood on his hands. If he isn’t, then Reyes still owes his memory better.

After all, in a roundabout way, Reyes is the reason that McCree was ever in this position. His pity kept a kid out of supermax, and his suspicion sent him to boot camp instead of letting him go free. At the time, Reyes wasn’t sure whether McCree was a victim of circumstance or a genuine psychopath. If he was the latter, there’s no telling what he would do if left to run wild. If it was the former, well, there were plenty of desk jobs. Maybe he’d have wanted to do something other than shoot.  Reyes swears to himself, even now, that if McCree had ever asked he would have taken him out of the field.

But McCree hadn’t. He wasn’t a monster, that was immediately clear, but he’d had an anger in him that took years to cool, and he was eager to put it to use. He was born into a world barreling toward chaos, and he was just one of billions wounded in the fray. Reyes often wondered how many McCrees were out there, victims of a war Reyes didn’t end quickly enough. Couldn’t end quickly enough.

But Reyes can’t do anything about the decisions he’d already made; he can only do what he can with the fallout. McCree had lived fast. Maybe he’s just died young. Reyes had the privilege of watching that miserable, angry boy grow into a man of substance, of principle. And, now, he has the duty of finding the people who’ve taken him, who’ve maybe killed him. McCree is a good man by any standard Reyes cares to recognize, and if he’s dead then Reyes intends to makes his death cost dearly. He is sure that this is right, that this is _just_ in a way he hasn’t felt in a long time.

This he’s also sure of—if his and Hanzo’s positions were reversed, Reyes would want the shot at revenge.

On the ground, Hanzo’s phone starts buzzing, the screen lighting up. There’s an alphanumeric scrawl where a contact name would be on a civilian model.  Reyes stares at it. There’s nothing to gain and everything to lose by answering, by telling them that Hanzo’s fucked off. They’ll figure that out on their own soon enough. Instead of crushing the phone, however, he picks it up.

The screen goes dark again after a few more rings. It buzzes one more time—missed call notification—and then falls silent. Reyes looks around, taking a more careful assessment of his surroundings. He’d have noticed if Hanzo had walked in front of him, and behind him are the outskirts of this little town. Reyes didn’t hear the car door open, which means Hanzo left without his weapon. The suspicious bastard wouldn’t have done that if he was in his right mind, never mind that he’d looked like he was about to be sick right before Reyes stopped paying attention to him. If he’s not thinking straight and on foot, he won’t have made it far.

 

* * *

 

Reyes finds a motel a few blocks away, and it seems like a promising place to start. It’s an automated affair, with a lone kiosk distributing keycards sitting in a neglected lobby that reeks of mildew. There’s old graffiti on one wall that’s been halfheartedly scrubbed, and a light in the corner that flickers intermittently. No one else is in the lobby, and it looks unlikely that anyone will be soon.

Reyes checks the kiosk. It presents him with the layout of the motel, all the occupied rooms marked in dark gray. He memorizes those rooms—there aren’t many—and goes back outside. Hanzo’s phone starts buzzing in his pocket as he reaches the edge of the parking lot. He pulls it out to silence it, but otherwise lets it ring out. Reyes walks around the edge of the parking lot, keeping to the shadows cast by the stunted trees ringing the pavement, until he can get to the back of the motel.

The motel is only one story, a long building dotted evenly with identical windows. Reyes turns over the list of rooms in his head. Not all the occupied rooms are lit, but there’s just one with the curtains drawn tight, light barely bleeding out around the edges. Where Reyes can see inside, he doesn’t see anyone that could be Hanzo.

Hanzo does seem like he’d at least have the sense to pull the curtains.

Reyes walks closer. There’s only a single security light at the far corner of the building, and luckily it doesn’t do much to light where Reyes wants to go. He listens for a moment at the darkened window, but he can’t hear anything over the humming of the window air conditioner. He _can_ just barely see around the edge of the curtain, however.

That’s almost certainly Hanzo, sitting with his back to the window. Reyes turns around and looks, but there’s no one who could see him. In his pocket, the phone rings again. Reyes freezes, waits it out. Overwatch must be panicking. Good. They should be.

Reyes exhales, relaxes. He’s able to stretch, to pull himself through the gaps left by the window unit and into the room. Reyes pulls himself back together just in front of the window. The room is shabby—probably renovated when it was converted to a self-serve system and never touched again—and not that clean. Hanzo is sitting on the bed with a convenience store bag beside him, a plastic bottle poking out. The room is lit only by the lamp on the night stand and has the sharp smell of cheap liquor and smoke. Reyes wrinkles his nose.

Reyes throws Hanzo’s phone on the bed. Hanzo starts, then whips around. He’s got Peacekeeper by the barrel in one hand and a bottle in the other. There’s bewilderment on his face at first, an open mouthed gawk punctuated by the cigarette just barely clinging to his lower lip, but it fades to a kind of resignation as he recognizes Reyes, and he turns back around.

“They’ve been calling non-stop,” Reyes says. “They’re going to come looking eventually.”

Hanzo shrugs and takes a drink around the cigarette. The amber liquid inside bubbles in time with the sound of Hanzo’s throat working.

“Why are you here?” Hanzo asks. His diction is off; he’s trying to sound more sober than he is. As if he could fool anyone for a minute. Reyes walks around the bed so he’s not talking to the back of Hanzo’s head.

“You’re a loose end,” Reyes says. Even he’s not sure if it’s a joke or a threat. Hanzo huffs once and sneers up at him, setting Peacekeeper aside. He spreads his arms, opening himself up in a wordless invitation.

“Anybody ever tell you that you’re a mess?” Reyes asks. He pulls a chair away from the small table and sits down on it backwards, draping his arms over the back. Hanzo laughs, though it’s a bitter sound, and relaxes again.

“Constantly,” he answers. The label on the fifth he’s holding is half off the bottle already, but he picks at it some more. It tears, and Hanzo starts scraping at the adhesive instead. “Jesse doesn’t mind.”

His entire posture changes once McCree’s name leaves his mouth. He curls in on himself, like the gravity of his misery is a real, crushing force, and his eyes fall to the floor. He lifts the bottle up and takes another drink. That cheap shit must burn, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at him.  He drinks it like it’s water.

“Didn’t mind, I mean,” Hanzo amends, mostly to himself.  His free hand clenches into a fist, his knuckles white.

“Possibly,” Reyes says, sighing long and heavy. This was always a possibility, Reyes reminds himself. He always knew, in the back of his mind, that he might have to bury McCree. It does seem like a particularly bitter twist of fate that it could be _now_ , that after he survived almost two decades in Blackwatch, after he narrowly missed the explosion in Geneva, this is what might have done him in.

Why couldn’t he have just done what he’d been told?

Abruptly, Hanzo hurls the bottle into the wall. Being plastic, it doesn’t shatter, but its contents spill down the wall and onto the carpet. Hanzo leans forward into his hands, his fingers curling into his hair and pulling strands out of his bun.

“He’s gone,” Hanzo says in a small voice. “I lost him.”

He shudders, takes one ragged breath, then another. Then he digs into his pocket and pulls out his cigarettes. Sucks what’s left of the one he has down to the filter, puts it out on the night stand, and lights a new one. He stares blankly ahead for a moment before speaking again.

“The last thing I told him,” Hanzo interrupts himself with a laugh, a thin, hysterical sound. “was to fix his collar. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry, I would have at least told him goodbye. But no, that’s it. ‘Your collar is crooked.’”

Reyes has more experience than any person should with that kind of regret, though he never did get more cautious with his words. He wishes he had.

There are so many people Reyes lost in the Crisis. It was inevitable, with death around every corner, that anything you said might be the last words you ever exchanged with someone. But if you dwelt on it, bit back every joke, every jab, you’d go crazy. The exchanges Reyes remembered, the ones that rankled, were the warnings and orders he couldn’t get out fast enough. For many people, far too many, the last thing they heard was Reyes screaming _get down, fall back,_ or _don’t_!

The last thing he told McCree was _I had better never hear your name again_. He tells himself that it hadn’t come out that harshly, that McCree had understood what he meant. He had wanted McCree to lay low, to _stay safe_ , to stay out of the headlines and his intel reports, to disappear and just _live_. He tells himself that when McCree nodded and left, he’d understood it all and taken it to heart.

“There are worse things to have said,” Reyes says finally.

Hanzo shrugs, not meeting his eyes, and opens the second bottle, the cracking of the plastic cap louder than it has any right to be. He’s the fucking picture of misery. Maybe, maybe when there’s closure Reyes will truly feel the loss, but for now he still has the anger, and the anger demands action.

Hanzo’s phone lights up again and starts buzzing beside him, another numeric sequence flashing on the screen. Hanzo doesn’t seem to notice. Reyes leans forward, tipping the chair onto its back two legs, and swipes the phone off the bed. He presses the answer button and snaps his fingers in front of Hanzo’s nose. It takes a painful few seconds for his eyes to track back to the noise, and then he only stares at Reyes’ knuckles, perplexed. On the other end, someone starts shouting Hanzo’s name. Reyes shoves the phone into his empty hand.

Hanzo grunts into the mic, and there’s more shouting on the other end. Reyes can’t make any of it out. Hanzo winces and pulls the phone away from his ear until it quiets. He mutters something back, sounding almost petulant, and roughly puts out his second cigarette next to the first. Reyes knows enough Japanese to pick out _yes_ and _no_ , and that’s all Hanzo says for the rest of the conversation. He punctuates a particularly sharp _yes_ with another pull from the bottle. 

Hanzo ends the call and tosses the phone aside again, scrubbing his free hand over his face. He blows out a long sigh, then meets Reyes’ eyes with a surprisingly composed expression.

“They want me to stay where I am.”

“How long?”

Hanzo shrugs one shoulder.

“Until they come for me.”

Reyes presses his lips together. It’s unlikely that they’ll come before Sombra finishes. Every moment wasted after that will make it that much harder to find everyone involved.

“You going to wait?”

Hanzo taps his finger against the bottle, his gaze not wavering.

“Why?” Hanzo asks.

Reyes grunts, unsure of what he means, and Hanzo scowls.

“We cannot find him, if he’s even still alive to be found. If you were going to kill me, you would have just done it. Why are you here?” Hanzo asks, accusing.

Reyes sighs, mostly to himself, and pulls his mask down. This is the kind of thing that’s said face to face. Hanzo tenses a little at the sight, and Reyes honestly can’t blame him. Once upon a time, he cut a pretty good figure, but getting blown halfway to hell and buried under a building didn’t do him any favors. O’Deorain’s nanites kept him alive, but they didn’t handle the wholesale loss of tissue well then, especially when there was rebar interfering.

“I’m not going to stop looking. McCree might already be—” Reyes stops and takes a long breath. Unbidden, the memory of what McCree looked like in his first Overwatch uniform surfaces. It hung off his skinny frame, made him look even younger than he was. Like a kid playing dress up. Regular meals had him filling it out pretty quick, but Reyes couldn’t shake that first impression. “I have no intention of letting anyone get away with this. If you want a chance at revenge, this is your shot.”

Hanzo is silent for a moment, utterly unmoving. Reyes doesn’t let himself be the one to break eye contact. He’s not going to wavier, and he wants Hanzo to see it. Then, abruptly, Hanzo shakes his head and takes another drink.

“I do. Want revenge. But why go to all this trouble?” Hanzo asks, less hostile and more curious.

“I’m still alive because of McCree,” Reyes says. “And he was my right hand for years.”

Hanzo stares at him, blinking owlishly as if he doesn’t know what Reyes is talking about. Maybe he doesn’t. If McCree hadn’t pushed, Reyes wouldn’t have consulted Dr. O’Deorain about the enhancements failing. If he hadn’t acquiesced to the treatment she developed almost miraculously, he wouldn’t have survived Headquarters falling down on his head. Feeling his body fail him and surviving anyway had left him with clarity, put things in perspective. Nobody, but especially not him, had time to be fucking around when there was so much to be put right in the world.

“SEP didn’t build us to last. McCree was supposed to take over after me, but I guess the paperwork scared him off, so he hounded R&D into keeping his CO around instead.” Reyes holds up his hand and lets it blur. “SEP sure as shit didn’t give us the option to do this.”

Hanzo doesn’t seem to have any remarks on that, just a faintly contemplative expression. Reyes digs into his pocket and pulls out an e-ration. They taste like someone had already eaten them, but they’re energy dense and shelf stable for a geologic epoch and that’s what’s important. He hasn’t eaten in hours.

“How can you eat right now?” Hanzo scoffs.

“If it were possible, this shit would run on sunshine and bad language, but it takes calories. It’s not pretty what happens when it doesn’t have raw material to work with handy.”

Hanzo rolls his eyes and takes another sip. Honestly, Reyes is a little impressed that he’s still upright, though he expects that won’t last. He honestly understands the impulse to crawl into a bottle at a time like this, but it’s never anything but counterproductive.

“Cut that out and get some sleep. When I get news, we’re leaving no matter how hungover you are.”

Hanzo gives him a shitty look, but he twists the cap back onto the bottle without saying anything else. He moves to lie on the bed properly, but doesn’t even bother with pulling down the comforter. Reyes flips the chair back around and stretches his legs out. He’s slept on _much_ worse.

Hanzo turns off the lamp, and settles on his back. Even in the black, Reyes can tell he’s starting at the ceiling. He can’t make him sleep, but if he sobers up, that will have to be good enough. Reyes crosses his arms and rests his chin on his chest. Bit dint of long practice, almost immediately he drops off.

 

* * *

 

Reyes snaps back to alertness. It’s still dark in the motel room, no light from outside either, so Hanzo is still not up and neither is the sun. Reyes realizes what woke him when his pocket buzzes again. He pulls out his handset and answers.

“You’re going to Atlanta,” Sombra says without preamble. “I’m sending you the specifics, but head for Atlanta. Like, _now_.”

“Got it,” Reyes says. He hangs up and gets to his feet. He kicks the bed instead of shaking Hanzo awake, figuring he’ll either take a swing or be sick on Reyes’ boots if he gets closer. Hanzo jerks upright gracelessly, looking around in confusion.

“Get up.”

Hanzo grunts in reply, patting around the bed. He ignores the bottle in favor of Peacekeeper, and stuffs it into his belt under his jacket. Hanzo is unsteady on his feet, but he leaves the room under his own power.

Reyes leads him to the car, but stops at the trunk. He pulls out a few more e-rations for himself and a bottle of water for Hanzo.

“Drink this.”

Hanzo doesn’t thank him, but he doesn’t argue either. He drains half in one go and opens the door, dropping heavily into his seat. Reyes starts the car and checks his handset. Sombra hasn’t sent him any else yet, but she will. He punches Atlanta into the navigation and starts driving.

 

* * *

 

Hanzo jerks in his seat. He didn’t stay awake very long after they set back out, exhaustion and liquor pulling him back under. Reyes glances at him. His eyes are still closed, though his breathing is sharp and quick, and even in the feeble light from the car’s instruments Reyes can tell his face is twisted up into something pained. Nightmare, then. Reyes doesn’t find himself particularly surprised.

Hanzo makes an abortive grab, then a strangled groan, and murmurs something unintelligible. Reyes wonders if he should wake him up, or wait for it to pass. He’s going to be hungover, and adding wounded pride to the mix certainly won’t make him more agreeable.

“Jesse!” Hanzo screams, jerking forward. The only thing that stops him from smacking his face into the dash is the seatbelt. He starts scrabbling at the belt and the door handles, getting the door open first. The car begins chiming a warning, a feminine voice gently saying _door open_ over and over again.

“Shit!” Reyes snarls, stomping the brakes. The night is lit by the harsh blue light of the forward thrusters as they fire opposite the car’s momentum. Just as Reyes drops their speed to single digits, Hanzo frees himself from the seat belt and tumbles out of the car onto the pavement. Reyes throws the car into park and climbs out himself, cursing under his breath the entire time.

Hanzo staggers away from the car for a few steps before collapsing to his knees in the grass beside the road, gasping desperately like there’s no oxygen in the thick night air. Reyes stands well out of arm’s reach as he contemplates what to do about it. It looks like he’s gone from night terror to panic attack, and they don’t have the time for this.

Just before he opens his mouth, something strange, by even Reyes’ high standards, happens. He notices the fine hairs on his arms and the back of neck stand up, and then a sharp, unnatural scent on the air—ionization, and the resulting ozone. There’s not a cloud in the sky, but that’s the smell of lightning. Reyes drops to the ground, hoping to no longer be the path of least resistance upward, and curses his luck.

That’s not the strange thing. The strange thing is that Hanzo starts glowing blue.

Peripherally, Reyes was always aware that Genji could _do_ something that resulted in a green light show that looked suspiciously dragon-like and when asked called it _magic_. It wasn’t something Reyes liked to think about, because it wasn’t something he could explain or control. Genji could use it to magnificent effect in the field and didn’t cause trouble with it in his down time, and that was as much as Reyes needed to know.

Now, with a pair of serpentine figures arcing through and around Hanzo, he wishes he’d dug a little deeper. The air is crackling, something Reyes feels more than hears, but otherwise it’s quiet aside from Hanzo’s labored breathing. Carefully, Reyes pushes himself back to his feet. Whatever those _things_ are, they don’t seem to have noticed him.

“Hanzo!” Reyes calls. He walks forward, and almost collapses. He feels _weak_ , _sick_ , like it’s the first round of injections they gave them in SEP all over again. He looks down, and dead nanites are falling off him in waves. He steps back, and that leg gives under him, and he falls back.

Even with the modest increase in distance, he feels better. He pushes himself back until he feels like he isn’t about to keel over on the spot. He hasn’t felt like that since the last time he was too close to an EMP. The nanites don’t cope well with high energy discharges.

What the hell are those things?

“Hanzo! Breathe!” Reyes tries again, falling back on his CO voice—calm, authoritative, even. Hanzo turns toward him, wide eyed and dazed, and the blue light starts to fade. He looks for all the world like a damn recruit that got pushed too far, light show aside. “You’re on the side of the road in the United States. It’s almost five hundred hours. McCree is still missing. You had a nightmare.”

Hanzo stares for a second before turning back and retching. Reyes grimaces and goes back to the car, getting another bottle of water. Hanzo is dry heaving when Reyes walks back up to him, making sure his boots fall heavily enough to be heard. Reyes holds out the bottle.

Hanzo takes it, his hands visibly shaking. It takes him a couple of tries to open it. When he does, he spits his first swallow back out, then takes a few small sips. Reyes crouches beside him, so he doesn’t loom. Hanzo seems to have his breathing back under control, seems more aware. If there’s a sheen in his eyes, well, Reyes will just blame a trick of the light.

“This happen a lot?” Reyes asks.

Hanzo doesn’t answer, which is answer enough.

“What helps?” Reyes doubts it’ll be anything he can do, but sometimes it helps to get them talking, keep them distracted.

“Jesse,” Hanzo murmurs. “Or sake.”

“What did he do?”

“I don’t—he just—he takes up all the space. You must know how he is.”

It wasn’t like that at first, but eventually, yes. McCree could single handedly fill a room if so inclined. Reyes absolutely believes he could bully back demons on force of personality alone.

“I do,” Reyes agrees. “Can you stand?”

Hanzo nods. Reyes stands and offers his hand. Hanzo takes it, lets himself be pulled to his feet. If Hanzo were one of his, back when he had a team under him he trusted and, hell, _liked_ , this is when he’d have reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder. Said something else to motivate or lighten the mood, depending on what he needed. But Hanzo isn’t, and those skills are rusty anyway, so Reyes just turns around to give him some privacy and walks toward the car.

“Reyes,” Hanzo says just he pulls the door open. “They, Overwatch, have compunctions about unnecessary force. I trust you don’t share them?”

Reyes meets his eyes across the car. He will always think of McCree as one of his, no one gets away with fucking with his people. Not while he draws wind.

“Hardly.”

Reyes drops into the car and throws it back into drive once Hanzo has followed. Sombra sent along a promise to keep their path clear from LEOs and anyone else when she sent along the exact heading. One way or another, this will be over soon.


	4. Sanctuary

“This is it?” Hanzo says, skeptical.

 _This_ being an abandoned rest stop on a highway that was downgraded from interstate status pre-Crisis. It’s barely visible from the road, owing to the shrubby trees and kudzu that have reclaimed the land, and a solid thirty klicks from _anything_ in any direction, at least by road. Lonely and unpatrolled, it’s not a bad spot if you want privacy from prying eyes.

Reyes trusts that Sombra did her job right, so he doesn’t respond. He parks the car off the exit ramp, behind a patch of shrubs. The woody stems scrape loudly against the undercarriage, but Reyes doesn’t pay it any mind. The greenery should hide the car from anyone driving up behind it.

Reyes pops the trunk and gets out. He has simple point-to-point radios packed, they’ll need those. He pulls them out of his gear bag and searches through it for anything else. He doesn’t need ammunition anymore, though he has a little packed on the off chance the nanites run low on raw material. Under an emergency blanket are a set of canisters and folded black bag. Reyes stops cold as his fingers brush over them.

He’d forgotten these were in here.

Bright red, because omnics don’t process color like humans and they needed to be easy to spot, they were standard issue for NCOs and officers during the Crisis, though everyone who put on a uniform had training on them. Not that there was much to learn—like most standard gear, they were developed to be hard to fuck up. Not many steps, not much to go wrong. Just put your dead squad mate in the bag, curse your god, press the button, and then tip the ashes into the canister.

Not everyone made it out alive, but no one got left behind. Reyes had personally carried out eighty-seven canisters out of the Crisis, and a further twenty-two in Blackwatch. Altogether, one hundred and nine souls whose names he would never forget, whose weight he would never really put down.

He puts the possibility of there being a hundred and tenth out of his mind.

Hanzo accepts his radio, turning it on and tucking it into his ear. Reyes does the same.  They’re little more than walkie-talkies, but Reyes isn’t overly concerned with anyone intercepting them. The worst case scenario is that an omnic is paying attention to that frequency and raises the alarm seconds before they’d have attacked anyway. Reyes walks toward the building, and Hanzo follows.

“Do you have a plan?” Hanzo asks.

“We’ll wait until they’re all accounted for, hopefully out in the open, and then open fire. Don’t hit McCree. Don’t miss anyone else.”

Hanzo narrows his eyes, and his jaw clenches. Reyes thinks for a moment that he’s going to bitch about the insinuation that he would shoot McCree, but instead he blows out a long breath through his nose.

“I can clear out a group of them all at once,” Hanzo says.

“With that?” Reyes says, incredulous.

“Yes, with _this_.” There’s an unspoken _and_ there, and Reyes remember the night before. Remembers what Genji could do to a group of hostiles in close quarters.

“What about McCree?”

“They know Jesse. He’ll be safe.”

Hanzo sounds so completely sure that Reyes, for his part, at least believes that _he_ believes it. The faster this is over, the less time one of them will have to realize that McCree would make for excellent leverage. But if Hanzo is wrong and those _things_ do kill McCree, well—

Hanzo had better not be wrong.

“All right. You can say hello first, but wait for my mark.”

Hanzo nods, then climbs up the side of the building like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s not much of a sniper nest, but it’s elevation and the kudzu that’s worked its way up there should hide him well enough. Reyes walks to the edge of the parking lot, then unravels to take a place in the undergrowth. No break in the foliage or footprints that way.

Now it’s just the waiting.

 

* * *

 

Three big sedans slide almost soundlessly into the lot and park in a line. They’re all older models, heavily modified and covered in dents and scrapes. Maybe even a few bullet holes between them. Humans and omnics get out, but the drivers remain in their running vehicles.

No sign of McCree. He could be in the trunk of one of the cars, or these could be the buyers. Hanzo maintains his silence and his cover, waiting for Reyes’ signal. There could be hope for him yet.

Fifteen minutes later, four more vehicles pull into the lot—two sedans, one van, and a motorcycle. This group is all human. One of them looks like he tried to stop an MRAP with his face—what was already a puggish jowl is swollen and black with bruising, one eye bloated shut. A second has an arm in a sling and a carbine pressed awkwardly into his armpit. Likely, the broken arm is his dominant one.  

Reyes hopes McCree is responsible for that.

They open their van and pull someone out, dropping them to the ground. From the way they fall, they’re unconscious, or—Reyes grits his teeth, doesn’t think it. They’ve got a bag over their head, obscuring their identity, but even from here Reyes can see the remnants of a prosthesis on the left side. Hanzo sucks in a breath loud enough for the mic to pick it up.

“ _Jesse_.”

“Easy,” Reyes says. He wants to be sure he knows where everyone is before opening fire. The two groups approach each other, fanned out and postures wary. Utterly oblivious to the real threat.

“Take out the ones nearest McCree, on my mark,” Reyes murmurs into mic. He lifts himself out of a crouch, leaning forward and ready to run. “One, two, three, _mark_!”

Hanzo bellows out a war cry from his perch. It’s not the same phrase as what Reyes was used to hearing from Genji, but he figures it translates about the same way— _eat shit and die, motherfucker_. A lateral lightning bolt springs up, drawing a jagged path through the air from Hanzo toward one of the bounty hunters. The luckiest takes Hanzo’s arrow in his eye socket and drops immediately, and the others fall prey to the two long shapes jittering through the air, teeth and claws ripping and burning.  The cars and omnics drop like an EMP went off. Their drivers scramble out, but some get caught up in the fray anyway.

Those _things_ ignore the limp form on the ground entirely, leaving a wide berth as they otherwise follow the path of Hanzo’s shot.  The stink of burning flesh is pungent and thick, far worse than what he remembers. The screaming is about the same.

They begin to fade, expended or sated Reyes couldn’t say, and he bursts from cover. Reyes at a dead run is, quantitatively speaking, is pretty goddamn fast. After all, he is meant to go toe to toe with omnics. When they were done with him and Jack, even people like Wilhelm had to be encased in a Buick’s worth of metal to be able to keep up. A bunch of cut rate bounty hunters and gangsters are little more than target practice.

In the chaos he isn’t noticed until he’s in the thick of them. He body checks one man to disperse his momentum, sending him flying into someone else. There’s the sick, wet crack of bones breaking as they collide and fall, and Reyes fires on the prone pair. The discharge from a .10 gauge shell pulps the chest cavity of the first man and has enough energy left over to kill the second.

Maybe it’s a little more personal than target practice, Reyes concedes.

Reyes catches a bullet in the shoulder, but there’s blood in the air, raw material for the nanites. He laughs as the wound knits itself shut and fires again and again and again, twisting and moving to make sure he covers as much area as possible. At the periphery, the runners fall, cut down by arrows.

It’s over and as suddenly as it began. Reyes turns slowly, looking for any survivors, making sure that the area is secure. He sees Hanzo drop to the ground and start running.

“Jesse!”

He slides to a stop beside McCree, dropping his weapon and ripping the bag off McCree’s head. He leans over McCree and shakes him. Reyes can hear fumbling Spanish peppered with McCree’s name like a strangled prayer— _wake up, Jesse, please, wake up, Jesse, wake up, please, Jesse, I love you, be okay—_ like there’s anything out there to intercede.

Reyes walks up to them, crouches down. He can hear McCree’s lungs rattle—damn kid hasn’t given up the smokes yet, apparently—and that’s as good a sign of life as one could ask for. Hanzo gives up on the shaking and pulls him up into his arms. He presses his lips to McCree’s hairline, then his cheek, then he tucks McCree’s head under his chin. He starts rocking slightly, and Reyes would bet anything he doesn’t know he’s doing it.

They stripped McCree down to his undershirt and pants. Didn’t even leave him with his socks, never mind his shoes. There are needle marks in his neck, a loose grouping with tiny trails of blood dried at different angles. Almost definitely a sedative, given that Hanzo hasn’t been able to rouse him. He’s also got a fat lip, two black eyes, and there’s blood matted in his hair, and that’s just what Reyes can see. Reyes reaches out to brush aside the hair around the head wound. The raw spot isn’t bleeding anymore, and he can’t see bone. It could be worse, but that’s cold comfort. It almost always could be worse.

Someone did a hackjob on his prosthesis, chopping it just below the elbow. The edges look melted. It would have hurt like a son of a bitch if he was awake for it. Impotent anger curls Reyes’ lips; they’ve likely just killed whoever did it, but that doesn’t seem like punishment enough. His other arm is curled awkwardly behind him, zip tied to the remnants of the prosthesis.

Gently, Reyes nudges McCree’s shoulder up, rolling him a little more into Hanzo, so he can better see. McCree’s hand is dangling limply, fingers dark and puffy from the restricted blood flow. Reyes pulls a knife out of his boot and cuts it, careful not to nick McCree.

Hanzo doesn’t hesitate to help him guide McCree’s arm into a more normal position and starts rubbing circulation back into McCree’s hand. It doesn’t take long for it to take on a more normal color. At least McCree wasn’t awake for _that_.

Reyes puts the knife away and looks at Hanzo. He’s got a sick, distant look that Reyes knows all too well; it’s partly over, they have McCree, but he’s not all right and right now there’s no telling if he’ll be truly all right again. Sometimes you don’t bring people home, at least not all of them. McCree’s tough, a survivor, but there’s no way for them to rule out some kind of brain injury, some kind of internal injury, something they won’t be able to fix in the field.

But Reyes can’t do anything about that, especially not here. He _can_ get him away from here, to a safe place where they can reassess. He has to stay focused on the things he can change.

“I’ll bring the car around.”

At first Reyes doesn’t think Hanzo heard him, but then he nods. Reyes trots away to the car and guides it out of the brush, through the carnage. Reyes leaves the car on when he gets out, and kneels back down in front of Hanzo. Reyes reaches out and slips his arms under McCree’s shoulders and knees, but Hanzo jerks him back, almost startled.

“I’m not gonna drop him,” Reyes says.

Hanzo closes his eyes for a few seconds and relaxes his grip on McCree.

“You had better not.”

Reyes snorts and takes McCree from Hanzo. Despite the fact that McCree can see eye to eye with him and has some not inconsiderable bulk of his own, Reyes lifts him easily from a crouch. He’s unwieldy, but Reyes hardly notices the weight. Hanzo picks his weapon up from the ground and turns to the car.

Hanzo pulls both passenger doors open, sets his weapons inside, and adjusts the front seat until it’s more flat than not. He slides into the bench seat in the back and leans into the front of the cabin to help guide McCree inside. The seatbelt won’t do him much good with McCree laid almost flat, but Hanzo pulls it over him anyway.

Reyes shuts both doors and walks around the car to the driver’s door. When he gets in, Hanzo is leaning over McCree from the back seat, bottom lip between his teeth. He’s laid one hand against McCree’s cheek, tipping his head towards himself. His entire focus is on McCree, like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. Like there’s nothing else in the world.

Reyes throws the car into gear and drives. The next stop he can find on his own.

 

* * *

 

Reyes guides the car up the washed out road, little more than a goat path. The daylight is fading, but he doesn’t risk the headlights despite the gloom of the overgrown brush. It’s not much further now, and the risk of attracting attention isn’t worth it.

He has dozens of places like these, little caches scattered across the planet. Places he’s never told a soul about. Places that are as safe as a man like him can be.

This one was a hunting cabin in a former life. Reyes had bought it because of the large, dry cellar underneath. The cabin is a rickety, drafty old thing, but the cellar was in good repair the last time he was here. It looks like the roof is still standing under the weight of the solar panels, so if the wildlife hasn’t gotten in and chewed any of the wiring, they might even be fairly comfortable down there. If the power’s not working, well, Reyes has chemlights packed in among his supplies.

Reyes pulls the car behind the cabin and turns it off. He turns toward his passengers. McCree hasn’t woken up, and Hanzo doesn’t seem to have moved.

“Let’s not waste daylight.”

Hanzo reluctantly pushes away from McCree and swings the door open. Reyes gets out, walks around to the passenger side. Hanzo has already got McCree unbuckled and has his legs swung out. He seems determined to carry McCree, so Reyes helps maneuver him onto Hanzo’s broad shoulders in a fireman’s carry. He waits a beat to make sure Hanzo isn’t about to topple under the bulk of a larger man, but he’s steady carrying both McCree and his own weapons.

Reyes leads them into the cabin. There’s no furniture, to deter squatters, and judging by the thick dust and cobwebs, no one else has been in here since Reyes last was. Reyes strides over to the cellar door, set into the floor along the back wall. The old floorboards creak under his weight, but they don’t threaten to give.

The door opens into the dark, and Reyes eases his way down the stairs. Hanzo waits at the top of the staircase, not even bothering to try to follow. Reyes feels his way down until his hand hits the breaker box. He flips the heavy switch, then taps the button for the light. A single bulb comes to life, and Reyes exhales the breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Wiring is still good, and that makes things easy.

The sturdy plastic crates with his supplies are still stacked against one wall, reassuringly dusty. Other than the crates, the cellar is empty. A dry, safe little bolt hole, with enough to keep a man like him alive for a month, but just that.

Hanzo follows carefully down the stairs, turned sideways so as not to bump McCree’s head. Reyes turns toward the crates, popping the latches on the one with the bedding. He pulls out a camp mattress and a sleeping bag and lays them both down on the floor against the opposite wall.

Between Reyes and Hanzo, it’s simple work to ease McCree onto the makeshift bed. Hanzo sets his bow and quiver aside and kneels down beside him, then pulls off his jacket and folds it carefully. He slips it under McCree’s head and brushes a few stray strands of hair out of McCree’s face. It’s a tender act, almost intimate, and Reyes decides to pretend he didn’t see, instead going for the first aid kit.

The kit is in one of the most accessible crates. When he first found and outfitted this place, he could still have needed it. Now, well, it seemed like tempting fate to get rid of it. He’s glad he didn’t right now. The white box is sitting on top, right where it should be.

He replaces the lid on the crate and turns around, opening the first aid kit as he goes. Hanzo has already pulled McCree’s shirt off, still has it clenched in his fist, but he didn’t get any further than that. He is brushing his fingers along the edge of a dark bruise on McCree’s ribs. It looks like the skin is abraded—like he was kicked by someone with heavy treaded boots and they ground their heel in—and Hanzo’s knuckles are white around the shirt. The look on his face is all imperious fury. 

They've gotten them back for that injury and all the others, Reyes reminds himself as he kneels down by McCree’s knees and sets the kit between himself and Hanzo. Hanzo riffles through, taking antiseptic cream and some alcohol wipes, but Reyes grabs the biotic emitter. By the look of him, McCree has enough spare calories stored that he’ll tolerate the demands of accelerated healing. Hopefully they’ll be able to feed him soon anyway. The emitter should handily burn through whatever sedative remains in his system.

Reyes turns it on and sets it beside McCree’s torso. The field washes over him, leaving him with a nervous kind of energy. It used to simply feel good, warm and comforting, but now it’s like tossing kerosene on a bonfire.  McCree needs it though, and that trumps his discomfort.

Hanzo starts working at McCree’s head, carefully cleaning the wound just above McCree’s temple with the alcohol wipes. Hanzo is making small, tentative movements, applying the minimum amount of pressure, like he’s terrified of doing more damage. The wipe quickly turns a muddy brown from the dried blood. 

When Hanzo finished with McCree’s head, he rolls McCree onto his side, exposing his back. There are other bruises, though their severity is hard to judge for the tattoos.

McCree had the Lady of Guadalupe and the tramp stamp the last time Reyes saw him, but there are two new ones—an eagle headed god and an angel. Reyes meets the dark eyes of the heavenly messenger, his stern features scowling back. He has a long horn clenched in one fist, the other hand pointing up to the heavens.  Reyes has seen variations on that image before, though he’s never been struck with the kind of foreboding this rendition of the angel Gabriel inspires in him.

Reyes knows why McCree has that tattoo, because he knows why he has the Lady. It’s a memorial of sorts. A gravestone, for a man with no graves to visit. The product of the way McCree works through grief. Reyes stares at it, frozen, until Hanzo shifts to block Reyes from the angel’s gaze.

“Do you have spare clothes?” Hanzo asks.

“Yeah.” Reyes stands, glad to put some distance between himself and the reminder of the cost he’s incurred. He opens another crate and pulls out a t-shirt, a pair of fatigue pants and socks, all new. He and McCree are built similarly enough that it all should fit. There’s a pack of wipes for washing without running water, and Reyes takes them too, hands the bundle to Hanzo.

“Check for breaks while you’re at it.” Reyes tosses his head at the emitter. “If he’s got a bad fracture that we don’t set, that thing will play hell.”

Hanzo nods and starts perfunctorily unbuttoning McCree’s pants. Reyes turns away, goes back up the stairs to check the car.

Outside, the sun is setting. The weak light is mostly blocked by the trees, but it’s enough. Reyes opens the trunk, pulls out an e-ration, and takes a bite. He chews and mulls. The water is probably worth bringing down. What’s down there is probably still potable but stale at best. The rest of his gear can stay out here for the night.

He opens one of the back doors and sees McCree’s hat in the gloom. Still worse for wear, but in one piece. Reyes takes another bite, grabs the hat, and kicks the door shut. He shuts the cellar door behind him on the way down, barring it in place.

Hanzo is using one of the wipes to clean under McCree’s fingernails when he returns. There’s a pile of used ones sitting beside him, gray and black with grime. McCree is dressed in the new t-shirt and fatigue pants, his dirty clothes folded neatly by his feet with Peacekeeper sitting on top. The emitter is still going strong, doing the heavy lifting, but there’s a shiny smear of antiseptic cream on McCree’s head wound like Hanzo doesn’t trust it.

Reyes pulls a few bottles free, setting them and McCree’s hat by the pile of clothes, and drops the rest of the water in the corner with the crates. He finishes off the ration and digs out a camp chair, then drops heavily into it. There isn’t much they can do except wait for him to wake up. Reyes comforts himself with the fact that if McCree were going to die on them, he’d probably have already done it.

Hanzo, apparently deciding that McCree is as clean as he’ll get, gathers up the used wipes and the other first aid detritus into a small pile and pushes it aside. He takes a bottle of water and opens it, taking a few pulls, then he shuffles around and leans back against the wall by McCree’s head. Hanzo closes his eyes and begins absently carding his fingers through McCree’s hair.

Hanzo’s hand eventually slows, then drops to the ground beside him. Reyes huffs softly when he realizes Hanzo has fallen asleep. He still feels jittery with the emitter operating, but it’s perhaps not so surprising that it in combination with everything else got the better of Hanzo.

After a while, the emitter clicks off, the golden glow fading and leaving him with only the harsh light from the uncovered bulb above. Reyes has been listening, but there’s no sounds that aren’t natural, no hint of danger.

No danger, and Reyes has done all he can for McCree. His work here is, technically, done. Overwatch will come for them eventually. As it stands, he hasn’t been absent from Talon beyond what he can explain, or what he could bully into going away.

He could go, _should_ go, but—

He knows that he wants to see for himself that McCree’s okay. He wants to see him wake up. He even wants to ream him for getting himself into his mess, if he’s being totally honest. He could leave, yes, but he’s going to see this through.

Reyes slides down in the chair a little, gets comfortable.

 

* * *

 

McCree groans and starts to fidget. Reyes cracks an eye open just in time to see Hanzo jerk in place, then look down at him. Hanzo lifts McCree into his lap and takes his hand. McCree’s eyes open slowly, squinting against the harsh light.

Hanzo smiles down at him, a real smile. Reyes can only think to call that look _joy_ and it turns Hanzo into a different person entirely. He goes softer somehow, all that haughty imperiousness falling away and leaving genuine relief behind. Hanzo lifts McCree’s hand to his own cheek and holds it there like that is its natural home.

“H’nzo?” McCree’s voice cracks on just the one word.

“Yes, yes, it’s me,” Hanzo answers.

McCree smiles back up at him, and Hanzo makes a noise that’s half sob and half giddy laugh. He kisses McCree’s palm, then leans over him to kiss his forehead.

“Where?” McCree asks. His voice is thready, almost painful to hear, and he coughs.  Hanzo shushes him softly and reaches out with his free hand, fumbling for a moment before finding a bottle of water. Hanzo pops the cap off one handed, and lifts it to McCree’s mouth.

“You’re safe. Here, drink this,” Hanzo says softly. In the silence of the room, McCree’s swallowing is loud. Hanzo tips the bottle down after a few gulps, and McCree makes small, plaintive sound. “Not so fast. I don’t want you to get sick.”

McCree twists his head into Hanzo like he’s trying to bury himself in the other man. Reyes clenches his jaw to keep from sighing. McCree’s got it bad. They both do.

“Arm feels bad,” McCree grumbles into Hanzo’s middle. Hanzo sets aside the bottle and pets McCree’s hair. For a moment, Reyes thinks McCree’s fallen asleep again, but then he jerks, struggles to sit up further. Hanzo pulls him against his chest, trying to shush him.

“Hanzo, what are you doin’ here? You gotta get, it ain’t _safe_ ,” McCree rasps. He jerks his hand out of Hanzo’s and flails wildly, maybe trying to push himself upright.

“No, no, Jesse, it’s all right, you’re safe, I found you,” Hanzo says in a rush. “You’re safe, you’re safe, I’ve got you.”

“How’d you find me? My arm—” McCree says faintly. Hanzo looks up at Reyes. Reyes nods. Better to get it over with now.

“I had help.”

McCree was looking up at Hanzo, confused, but his gaze drifts to Reyes. The color immediately drains from his face, and he stares wide-eyed and uncomprehending. Reyes lets his shoulders slump.

“ _Que onda, Jessito_.”

“ _Jefe_ ,” McCree replies in a strangled whisper. He looks lost, _hurt_ even. Reyes had thought about what he might say if he ever saw McCree again, but after Geneva he never thought it would actually happen. He finds himself at a loss for words with McCree’s stare pinning him down.

McCree starts to shove himself upright, staggers, and is caught by Hanzo, who’s clearly startled but quick enough to compensate. It’s unclear to Reyes whether McCree is helped by or simply drags along Hanzo, but in short order he’s got the slack of Reyes’ sweatshirt balled up in his fist. Anyone else, Reyes would put on the floor for having the gall, but Reyes just lifts a hand to McCree’s shoulder to steady him.

He’s off balance without his prosthesis. He’s spent so long compensating for its weight he’s clearly forgotten what the opposite was like. But then, he never really got time to adjust to the lack of an arm. In fact, Reyes isn’t sure he made it out of bed in the time between his defrosting and the implantation. Reyes had personally made the request to macroengineering to bump the fabrication of his prosthesis to the top of the queue, and Torbjorn had signed off on the approval himself, as a favor to an old friend. He’d also had a hand in the design, sworn it was better than what he’d built for himself.

Hanzo maneuvers himself to McCree’s side and holds him up from there, so Reyes lets him go and reaches back for the camp chair. He drops it beside McCree and points.

“Sit down before you fall down.”

“Not until you—”

“ _Sit_ ,” Reyes orders, and McCree drops. The chair creaks, but it holds. Hanzo moves to stand behind McCree, laying his hands lightly on his shoulders, and Reyes crouches down in front of him. He plucks McCree’s hand out of his lap and places two fingers across his palm.

“Squeeze.”

McCree blinks at him owlishly. Reyes cocks an eyebrow, unwilling to repeat himself. McCree finally does it; the pressure of his grip is enough to grind the bones of his fingers together, just shy of pain. Reyes wasn’t sure what he’d do if McCree’s hand _had_ been damaged by the restricted blood flow, but he’d wanted to know. Now he knows McCree can shoot if something were to demand it.

Reyes pulls his fingers free and sits back so he can look McCree in the eye.

“Name?”

“You know my name!”

“What was your rank when you retired?”

“The _hell_? Are you givin’ me a TBI assessment?”

“You might have had a skull fracture for all I know. Answer the question.”

“OR-6, cause you busted me down over Prague. _Don’t_ ,” McCree scowls and points at Reyes, “Say a fuckin’ word about OS.”

“ _You_ got yourself busted down for conduct unbefitting your rank,” Reyes huffs.

“Fuck bein' a senior noncom anyway, it's just ridin' a desk,” McCree mutters.

They exchanged almost the exact same words years ago, when McCree lost the rank. Reyes and McCree both know, but won’t say, that McCree didn’t want the responsibility. That he hadn’t wanted the promotion to Sergeant First Class. Hell, he hadn’t wanted the promotion to Staff Sergeant before that. That despite his decade and change of experience, he didn’t trust his own judgment enough to lead.

Blackwatch’s rank structure was fairly informal. Nominally, they used the same one as Overwatch, but there were jokes that there were only two ranks: _Reyes_ and _POR—_ people other than Reyes. In some ways, it was beneficial; in a small outfit, people tended to sort themselves and some of his assets would take a rigid command structure as a challenge. In other ways, not so much; Reyes was only one man in a dangerous line of work, and relying on the force of his personality, or sometimes just his force, wasn’t a long term solution.

Reyes had tried three separate times to send McCree to Officer School, because he was goddamn qualified for it, far more than the _children_ coming out of the military academies and tech colleges. McCree had weaseled out of it each time. If he was to succeed Reyes, that would include dealing with Overwatch proper, and they respected rank. McCree would have needed his butter bars sooner than later to move up quickly enough.

“Oh ess?” Hanzo says, hesitantly.

“No. _No_. Don’t ask,” McCree says.

Hanzo purses his lips, and Reyes would bet that in the future, he’ll absolutely be asking. The point’s well and truly moot now, but Reyes knows he can’t be the only one aware of the squandered potential.

“Well, if you can bitch, you’re probably fine.”

Reyes stands. McCree looks between him and Hanzo, his mouth open but unable to find words. Reyes pulls a card table from where it was stored behind the crates and unfolds the legs, then drags it in front of McCree.

“When’s the last time you ate?” Reyes asks.

“How the fuck are you here right now?” McCree responds.

“Ask me once you’ve replaced the calories from the emitter,” Reyes says. Reyes makes eye contact with Hanzo, who nods, and Reyes turns back and opens the crate with the MREs, pulling one out for himself. Reyes sits down on the floor and opens the MRE. McCree sputters, furious.

Hanzo riffles through the crate after him, looking, apparently, for specific menus. He pulls two packages out after what is entirely too much deliberation over something uniformly adequate and no better. Those get set on the table, and then Hanzo pulls around a crate to sit on it and hooks one foot around McCree’s ankle when he does. McCree shifts, like perhaps he would have reached out and done something with his left arm, frowns, and bumps Hanzo’s knee with his own.

Hanzo sets both packages on the card table and begins emptying them both into a constellation of dull brown bags. He takes both entrees and the ration heaters and starts the heaters without even looking at the instructions, clearly familiar already. While their food warms, Hanzo starts opening and divvying up the rest of the contents: two tiny bottles of tabasco end up in front of McCree with their caps off, as does the chemically yellow jalapeno cheese that shouldn’t be as good as it is. Hanzo places his hand on both bags of sweets, waits for McCree to grunt an affirmative, and then slides them in front of himself. The other bags, the side dishes and snacks, Hanzo opens and sets between them so they can both reach.

No words, no fuss. They’ve clearly shared enough meals like this that it’s almost reflexive to shuffle around the contents of MREs until they’re both as happy as they’re able with the result. Reyes had done much the same, what feels like eons ago. He and Ana fighting over the hot sauce and spice packets that Reinhardt and Torbjorn were quick to relinquish. Everyone immediately trying to give Jack anything that had even a hint of corn just to get a rise out of him, knowing full well he wanted the peanut butter so he could do something unholy to the entree. Hoarding anything with chocolate to barter with Gerard for cigarettes later.

McCree picks at a bag of pretzels, breaking them into pieces before eating them, and scowls at Reyes. Reyes up ends his bag of crackers into his mouth, rather than get his fingers dusty, and doesn’t rise to the bait. Hanzo absently eats one of the sweets, but his attention is clearly centered on McCree.

"What happened to your arm?" Hanzo murmurs.

"Thought I had a shot at gettin' away. Didn't go my way."

Hanzo's lips thin unhappily.

"Busted some of 'em up pretty good though."

Reyes smiles to himself. So that was McCree. 

Deciding enough time has passed, Hanzo pulls out their entrees and opens the bags, bracing McCree’s so that he can eat it with just the one hand. McCree dumps the contents of both bottles of Tabasco as well as the cheese into the bag and starts eating.

The silence that falls is heavy. Reyes minds his own food, not bothering to heat it up, and doesn’t break it. Hanzo doesn’t speak either, though he starts nudging food towards McCree once he’s finished his own. True to form, in the end McCree doesn’t let any of it go to waste.  

McCree drops the last empty bag on the table, clearing his throat. Hanzo shifts, lays a hand on McCree’s knee.

“So, you’re alive,” McCree starts.

“Looks like.”

“You look—” McCree gestures at his own face. Reyes lifts the corner of his lip, showing teeth.

“I got prettier, I’m told.”

McCree scoffs, maybe in spite of himself. He wets his lips and glances away for a moment. Reyes hasn’t seen him this discomfited since he was in his early twenties.

“Where in the hell have you _been_?” Then, softer. “I thought you were dead.”

“That was the plan,” Reyes answers. He leans forward, rests his arms over his knees. “And the less you know, the better.”

“He deserves to know,” Hanzo snaps. The threat is plain—either Reyes tells him or Hanzo will.  McCree twists to look at Hanzo, confused. Reyes sighs.

“Talon was able to destroy HQ, burn everything to the ground, because they had us from the inside.” Reyes smiles, but there’s nothing warm in it. “I thought, well, turnabout is fair play.”

Reyes watches McCree puts it together, still whip quick even after everything. Watches his anger and disbelief bleed into each other.

“No, no, _Reyes_ , you’re better than this!”

“No, McCree, but I’m equal to doing it. This is the only way to make Talon answer for what they did. For destroying what we built, for all the people they killed.”

“Do you even hear yourself!” McCree shouts. "Even if you were right, even if we were crawlin' with Talon lackeys, what can you do now on your own?"

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Do you? Do you really? 'Cause ever since you got sick, I ain't been so sure."

“Goddamnit, McCree!” Reyes snaps, pushing himself to his feet. “Do you expect me to just do nothing, like Jack or Ana did? For Christ’s sake, they tried to kill you.”

McCree’s expression falls. Hanzo turns to face him, suddenly looking concerned.

“Boss, it was bad luck, there wasn’t—”

“No one should have known you were there!” Reyes snarls. “I signed off on that mission myself, I checked every step of the plan, all the intel, and you still got blown halfway to hell! So don’t sit there and tell me it was bad luck. Someone in Blackwatch tried to kill you. Almost _did_ kill you.”

Reyes _hates_ the look on McCree’s face, viscerally loathes it. McCree’s staring at him like he’s something sad, something _pitiable_. Like he’s a confused old man.

“Wipe that look off your face. You wouldn’t have left if you didn’t think I was right.”

“I left because I couldn’t stand _this_ anymore!” McCree yells, almost pleading. “You’re not _well_. You were jumpin’ at shadows before, but now—I don’t know how to help you, Boss, I just don’t know.”

“You could keep your damn head down like I told you, for starters.”

McCree sighs, his shoulders slumping.

“Wasn’t like you were gonna ride my ass about joinin’ back up, you were dead.”

“Not an excuse. You got out and you should have stayed out.”

McCree stares at him for a long moment. Reyes stares back. Did he look that tired before he left? Reyes can’t remember. Maybe it's just the bruises that the emitter yellowed but couldn't quite heal.

“Come back with us,” McCree says finally. “We’re tryin’ to do the same thing, let us help you. _Please_.”

Reyes almost starts to shake his head, but doesn’t. He knows McCree, knows he won’t let this go. McCree can’t stop him from leaving. Hanzo could make it difficult, and probably would on McCree’s behalf. If he had to hurt Hanzo, Reyes would be leaving McCree without his best defense, and he doesn’t like the thought. There is an easy way out, clear as crystal in his mind. Cruel, unfair to McCree, but neat. Safe.

“I'll think about it while we wait for Overwatch to get you,” Reyes lies.

 

* * *

 

Reyes gets silently to his feet. They cracked a chemlight when they turned off the overhead light so they could sleep, so the only light in the room is that sickly green glow. A few feet away, Hanzo and McCree are still sleeping. They’re pressed together, as close as they can get. Hanzo’s arm is under McCree’s neck, McCree’s face tipped into Hanzo’s shoulder. McCree is snoring softly, and Hanzo is breathing in time. Dead to the world.

The stairs would creak if Reyes set foot on them, but he needn’t do that to leave. He unspools his body, drifts up the stairs, out of the cabin, and into the dawn air outside. Reyes slips back into the car and guides it back down the washed out road.

They’ll be all right, Reyes is sure. They have Hanzo’s phone, plenty of food, and sturdy shelter. Overwatch could take a week and they’d be no worse for the waiting. Reyes knows McCree will go back with Overwatch when they come, as much as he hates it. All the more reason to for Reyes to go.

He still has work to do.


End file.
